by
Bill Chambers In general, TV series aren't built to last beyond
four seasons. I think it has something to do with how the educational
system
teaches us that four-year cycles end in graduation. Showrunners
consequently
feel an obligation to symbolically reboot in season five--to send the
high-schoolers off to college ("Dawson's Creek"), to recast the leads
("The Dukes of Hazzard"), to have Fonzie waterski over Jaws
("Happy Days"). To be fair, redefining the status quo doesn't always
mean jumping the shark: for every Cousin Oliver, after all, there's a
Dawn
Summers. Unfortunately, "True Blood" is not one of the exceptions to
the rule, as it goes off the rails in its fifth season in a way that is
different from those countless other times it seemed to be flying
a
kamikaze mission towards ratings oblivion. (This is a show that has
elevated
jumping the shark to an artform.) A good chunk of the season is devoted
to
vampires--creatures who can, in the "True Blood"-verse, run like The
Flash, fly, and fuck like pornstars--sitting around a conference table
debating
politics and religion, and the other "super" groups don't exactly
pick up the slack, what with the werewolves holding auditions for a new pack
leader
and the faes throwing slumber parties with their new BFF, Sookie.

by Walter Chaw It's easy to tag the prurient appeal of Andrea Bianchi's
Strip
Nude for your Killer (if I'd discovered this film in my early
teens, I never would've left the house), but without a lot of effort,
its usefulness as a tool for dissecting its audience of voyeurs becomes
clear as well. Indeed, it's possible to see the picture as a hybrid of
Michael Powell's Peeping Tom (in the equation of
scopophilia with rape and murder) and Michelangelo Antonioni's Blow-Up
(in its protagonist's profession (fashion
photographer), its boundaries-testing raciness, and a central mystery
that hinges on a photograph), with every scene of obvious leering
exploitation balanced by a long look in a mirror, a humiliating photo
shoot (something we see in both Peeping Tom and Blow-Up)
reflected upside-down in a metal surface, and what seems like knowing
interpositions of an idea of retributive guilt at the film's bloodiest
moments. Before every giallo set-piece murder, in
fact, Bianchi inserts a flash of the woman killed during a pre-credit
sequence back-alley abortion. It might not be simple morality, but it
does speak to a variety of morality: a championing of demi-innocents
undertaken by a heavy-breathing avatar in a motorcycle helmet and
leather. Could there be a whiff of the pro-woman picture in the
unlikeliest of places?

by Walter Chaw If Inglourious Basterds was an
ambiguous, brilliant indictment of "Jewish vengeance" wrapped in this
impossibly canny exploration of violence through screenwriting, performance,
and love of film, think of Quentin Tarantino's follow-up, Django Unchained, as a glorious continuation of what has become a singular artist's evolving
theme. It demonstrates an absolute command of the medium, of what film can do
when tasked to do more than usual, and it does it by
being some of the finest film criticism of the year. If the
Coens are our best literary critics, then Tarantino is our best film critic cum
sociologist, and his topics, again, are how we understand history through
specific prisms and how violence can be both catharsis and atrocity--often
in the same breath and almost always in the same ways. Consider that this difficult film's most difficult moment comes, as it does in Inglourious Basterds, at the very end, in an unbearably ugly act of violence perpetrated against not the expected slave-owner
antagonist, Candie (Leonardo DiCaprio), but his manservant Stephen/Stepin
(Samuel L. Jackson). Consider, too, the idea that vengeance--particularly in
our post-9/11 environment--is the proverbial tiger we've caught by the tail:
our cultural legacy that we try to justify through any means, given that our
ends are so very righteous.

April 12, 2013

by Angelo Muredda Few filmmakers know how to put you on your
guard from the first frame as effectively as Abbas Kiarostami. It's clear
enough that Like
Someone in Love opens in a bar in Tokyo, but it's
harder to say at first what we're looking at and why. The closest voice we hear
belongs to the off-camera Akiko (Rin Takanashi), a young woman who's a little too preoccupied with lying her way out
of a hostile phone conversation to process the flat image of well-dressed young
revellers in front of her. Whether she's our lead takes a couple of false tries
to figure out. Our first candidate is a redhead around her age, sitting at a
table off to the side until she suddenly relocates to an empty seat in the
foreground, coaching Akiko through the rest of her call until she relinquishes
her spot moments later to a fortysomething man who speaks to both women with
first the familiarity of a parent, then the condescension of a high-end pimp
directing his employees. Somewhere in-between these encounters, we briefly lose track of who's even doing the looking. Akiko waltzes into our field of
vision on the way to the bathroom, the camera fixed at where her eyeline used
to be after she's vacated her seat, as if holding her place until she gets
back.

April 9, 2013

by Jefferson Robbins Kathryn Bigelow's Zero
Dark Thirty is politically abhorrent, an ideologue's digest
of how torture "works" on behalf of democratic governments seeking to
defend from or avenge themselves upon terrorism. There's no debate: by
means of torture, CIA operative Maya (Jessica Chastain) digs her way
from Osama bin Laden's outer network to his inner circle, one, two,
three. As journalist Malcolm
Harris put it, "That Kathryn Bigelow used to be involved in left aesthetics
should make us shiver in fear about who we may yet become." But subtly,
in the way Bigelow presents her lead character's view of the
battlefield and the flag under which she strives, Zero Dark
Thirty betrays mixed feelings about its own ramifications.

by
Walter Chaw SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. The greatest irony
of Fede Alvarez's
otherwise laudably straightforward reboot of Sam Raimi's
Spam-in-a-cabin
classic The Evil Dead is that the moments where
it references its primogenitor
are actually the movie's weakest. I'm thinking, in particular, of
handsome young hero
David (Shiloh Fernandez) getting thrown around a wet cellar in high
Raimi
smash-zoom style, which only underscores how much the original films
drew their
tone from Bruce Campbell--and how much this new one misses him. The
danger of
casting a group of beautiful people and taking itself deadly seriously
(and jettisoning the "The," in a gesture that reads as hipster
insouciance) is that Evil Dead might
draw closer to the mainstream and farther from
its grindhouse roots. The small miracle of it, then, is that in both
its
absolute glee in finding the line of how much gore to show and then
crossing it
(a pair of glasses stop a hypodermic needle...but only for a moment)
and its
surprising efforts at locating a deeper thread in a frayed
brother/sister
relationship and the impact of drug addiction, Alvarez's film is a
solid, even
affecting genre piece that allows for an abundance of memorable money
shots. Compare
its intelligence and earnestness, its infernal energy, against
the
disrespectfulness and self-satisfaction of The Cabin in the
Woods to
see that Evil Dead is not just a taste of the old
religion, it's really
pretty great.

by
Walter Chaw Of all the
recognizable and memorable phrases that John Keats contributed to the
English
language, this ranks high:

A thing of beauty is a joy for ever: Its loveliness increases; it will never Pass into nothingness; but still will keep A bower quiet for us, and a sleep Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet
breathing.

by Walter Chaw Whenever I watch Casablanca (and there's a lot of pressure that comes with watching Casablanca (the chorus from Freaks
rings in my head: "One of us, one of us, we accept you, one of us")),
I'm stricken by what the film would have been had Orson Welles or John
Huston (or even Billy Wilder--Rick is, of course, the prototypical
Wilder outsider) sat at the helm instead of the madly prolific Michael
Curtiz. Schooled in German Expressionism, Curtiz, by the time of Casablanca,
had lost much of anything like a distinctive visual style, and on this
film, a troubled production from the start, there's a lack of
imagination to the direction that contributes, at least in part, to the
way that Casablanca just sort of sits there for long stretches.
For all of its magnificent performances (Claude Rains, best here or in
Alfred Hitchcock's Notorious; Peter Lorre, a personal favourite; and let's not forget Sydney Greenstreet), Casablanca
is curiously sterile: its politics are topical, but its love story is
passionate by dint of history rather than proximate ardour. Ingrid
Bergman arguably gave off more heat in Victor Fleming's Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde and inarguably did so in Gregory Ratoff's Intermezzo. Casablanca is legendary, and that forgives a lot of its blemishes.

by Walter Chaw Shot at a vaunted 48 frames-per-second to
better approximate the television soap opera its mammoth length suggests, Peter
Jackson's vainglorious trainwreck The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey
(hereafter "Hobbit 1") looks for all intents and purposes like
its own porn knock-off. A technological "advancement" that is to the
naked eye identical to any episode of reality television or live sporting event
you've been watching in your living room for years, the 48fps "breakthrough"
was for Jackson a way of making the increasingly unpopular new-gen 3-D a little
bit less crappy. It's like putting a dress on a pig. Understand, complaints
about "HFR" are not akin to the bellyaching about colour film or
CinemaScope, since those innovations didn't actively cheapen the moviegoing experience. The irony of all that being, of course, that while the
image indeed doesn't stutter or blur as much in 3-D, what we're forced to
look at is overlit, obviously artificial, and reminded me more than once of
the jarringly amateurish "Star Wars Holiday Special".

by Angelo Muredda As of this writing, the latest wannabe tastemaker to
thumb his nose at Zero Dark Thirty is novelist and
professional blowhard Bret Easton Ellis, who
tweeted that critics
lauding the film "need to admit that they're admiring a morally
indefensible movie." With that, Ellis joins an army of self-deputized film
writers who've taken issue on moral grounds with Kathryn Bigelow and Mark
Boal's treatment of the CIA's decade-spanning manhunt for Osama bin Laden. While Ellis's tasteless tweets about Bigelow's appearance a few weeks back
make his word suspect, it's harder to dismiss Glenn Greenwald, the liberal
firebrand whose initial survey of early praise for the film (then unseen by him) slammed Bigelow and Boal for glorifying torture. Incensed by the suggestion that crowd-sourcing knowledge about Zero Dark Thirty's representation of torture from the
likes of David Edelstein constituted poor form, Greenwald soon saw the picture for
himself and insisted that the viewing
only confirmed his initial impressions: "[T]o depict X as valuable in enabling the killing
of bin Laden is - by definition - to glorify X," he observed, where X
meant torture; woe to the "huge numbers of American viewers" about to
be "led" down the filmmakers' dim alleyways.

by Walter Chaw Julia Loktev's The Loneliest Planet
is an existentially terrifying little film about life's essential loneliness,
the absolute mutability of interpersonal relationships, and the ways our
identities are formed not only by our perceptions of others, but by our
preconceptions of the roles we play and, in turn, cast others to
play, unbeknownst to them or to anyone. It gives the lie to the
possibility of an unconditional relationship, to the idea that we can ever
truly know ourselves or the people with whom we choose to share our lives. Most
uncomfortably of all, it posits that everything we believe, everything we hold
most dear about who we are and who we think we are, can change in an instant. It's
about love in that way, but love only in the context of the brutal, capricious,
arbitrary world--love in the sense that we invest everything in it in acts of
faith entirely unjustified by Nature and circumstance. There's a scene in The
Loneliest Planet where two pairs of feet play with each other on top of a
sleeping bag, followed fast, after something small but terrible happens, by the
owner of one pair of those feet watching the owner of the other walk away and
eventually disappear into the ugly, insensate terrain of Russian Georgia's
Caucasus mountains. I think it's no accident that the film takes place there,
where mythology places Titan Prometheus in his eternal torment: Prometheus the
bringer of fire, and life, and foresight (literally, in his name)--the father
of Man flayed bare and reintroduced to the carnal night.

February 24, 2013

by Angelo Muredda It's no great shock that Holy Motors is innovative, coming from
the same headspace as The Lovers on the
Bridge and Mauvais Sang--movies
that seemed fashioned out of whole cloth despite their indebtedness to names
like David Bowie and Herman Melville. What's most surprising is that beneath
the formal variety and cheekiness, mainstays of Leos Carax's freewheeling cinema,
is a moving and altogether serious exploration of what it means to be an actor,
in both a professional and a metaphysical sense. Carax's films have been ranked
among the boldest aesthetic manifestos since the 1980s for good reason, yet the
ineffable quality that distinguishes them from the superficially similar
grandstanding of nascent stylists like Xavier Dolan is their deep sincerity and
unabashed adoration of the eccentric city-dwellers who cross paths on the
loneliest roads in urban France. If Holy
Motors is even wilder in presentation than its predecessors, then, it's
also perfectly legible within a body of work that's always found a human streak
in the avant-garde.

by Jefferson
Robbins One
political cue most firmly plants Jean Renoir's masterwork in pre-World
War II France, and it doesn't come amidst the posturing of the elegant
rich at La Colinière country manor. Rather, it's in the kitchen, where
the domestic staff breaks bread and gossips about the master of the
house, the Marquis Robert De La Chesnaye (Marcel Dalio), outed by the
help as a "yid" whose family made good with money and a title. The
gossipers turn for confirmation to the huntsman who's just materialized
on the stairs, and the combination of words is chilling: "Isn't that
right, Schumacher?" The italics are mine, and
despite the fierce Teutonic consonants of his name, the marquis's game
warden (Gaston Modot) is Alsatian. He remains metaphorically sticky,
though, since his home state was variously French or German for 200
years, and his dress and cap bespeak armed authority. He's rough and
field-hardened, arguably ignorant, and looked down upon by his fellow
servants, who see him as a thing apart from their world. Cuckolded and
exiled from his wife, the housemaid Lisette (Paulette Dubost), he's
also the most prone to physical violence as he seeks to control her and
eliminate all rivalry. On the matter of La Chesnaye's Jewishness,
Schumacher demurs: "I don't know what you're talking about." But the
point is made, the knife already twisted.

by Walter Chaw I think you enter into a handshake
agreement with The Apparition that it's never, not for a moment, going to be scary when in its prologue, we're introduced to Harry Potter
alum Tom "Draco" Felton as a grad student or something in a Doc Brown
helmet prattling on about "anomalistic psychology" in
that affected, pained way the Harry Potter alums (see: Emma
"Hermione" Watson in The Perks of Being a Wallflower) seem to have
adopted post-franchise. Or maybe it's the first scene between central pretties Kelly and Ben (Ashley Greene and Sebastian Stan), which, without fail,
sports extra, meaningless, unintentionally hysterical blank reaction
shots, thus announcing, in addition to hyphenate Todd Lincoln's inability to
cast, his inability to frame shots or hire an editor (or three, as the case may
be). To The Apparition's credit, though, milquetoast hero Ben is wearing the Bauhaus T-shirt I used to wear in high school when I wasn't trying to be hip, so...yay for being old enough to have a direct connection to a hipster reference. As for the
rest of it, it's kind of astonishing that this didn't land as a dtv relic
submitted for the immediate disapproval of the Netflix-streaming peanut
gallery.

January 20, 2013

**/****
Image A+
Sound A
Extras C+screenplay
by John August, based on a screenplay by Lenny Rippsdirected
by Tim Burton

click
any image to enlarge

by
Bill Chambers SPOILER WARNING IN EFFECT. Back in the
early-Eighties, Tim Burton was
part of the conveyor belt at the Walt Disney Company, cranking out
artwork for
films like The Fox and the Hound and The
Black Cauldron. But
drawing cuddly animals proved as bad a fit for Burton as it did for R.
Crumb,
and the studio eventually allowed him to separate from the pack, giving
him a
chance to hone his voice that was kind of unprecedented. Under the
Disney
umbrella, Burton produced two black-and-white shorts: the animated Vincent,
a sweet and Seussian ode to his idol, Vincent Price (who narrated); and
the
live-action Frankenweenie, about a boy who uses
mad science to bring his departed canine back to life. The latter
scandalized Disney (too "scary," plus dead dogs and black-and-white
have got to be roughly equivalent anathema to kiddie fare), and plans
were
shelved to attach the film to prints of Pinocchio
in 1984. Three decades later, Disney confidently bankrolled a
feature-length remake of Frankenweenie,
stop-motion animated this time but still in black-and-white, and still
with an
undead dog at the crux of the narrative. What changed in the interim?